The term brain drain was coined by the spokesmen of the Royal Society of London to describe the outflow of scientists and technologists to the United States and Canada in the early 1950s. Since then the term has become synonymous with human capital or the migration of highly educated individuals from the developing, mostly third world countries, to the developed ones.
Over the past few decades, more since Pakistan has been lurched full throttle into economic and political chaos, the phenomenon has become the bane of the society. The number of repining Pakistanis who wish to settle abroad is rising every year and the ones who are actually capable of breaking loose are coincidentally the educated ones, contributing alarmingly to the growing crisis of the Pakistani brain drain. To leave the country and settle abroad has become the zeitgeist of current day Pakistan.
Unfortunately either the government does not realize the severity of the problem or prefers to brush it under the proverbial rug like so many other issues. The migration of the Pakistani professionals to foreign countries, namely, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand has increased considerably with young educated and skilled Pakistani such as doctors, IT Experts, scientists and other professional either already gone or planning to leave. The fact that workers from all skill levels are losing or have completely lost faith in the economic future of the country was revealed by the Gallup survey that indicated that even the semi-skilled and unskilled workers want to migrate outside in search of better prospects. 62 percent of the adults who were surveyed expressed the desire to migrate abroad while 38 percent said that they would prefer to settle outside permanently.
It is often thought that the transmittance of funds by the ones who leave the country as a result of brain drain is a good enough substitute for these individuals actually staying in the country and working. But that idea is valid only to a minimal extent as there can be no substitute for services these professionals could be rendering the country by staying within the borders and adding to a far rapid economic, scientific and technological development of the country. Again, that can only happen if the proper infrastructure is provided to them whereby the country could earn manifold the money it receives from transmittance from the migrated workers.
According to Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan of George Washington University every doctor who leaves a poor nation leaves a hole that cannot be filled. He says,
“That creates enormous problems for the source country and the educational and health leaders in the country who are attempting to provide healers”.
Research shows that at 20 countries export more than 10 percent of their physician work force to richer nations with nearly no reciprocation as the US exports less than one-tenth of 1 percent of its doctors. Economic factor is primarily responsible for this mass migration of the scientific community from poorer, host countries like Pakistan. In Pakistan the value placed for a scientist with an advanced level degree is Grade 17 which comes with a salary that is totally insufficient to meet the basic requirements of a family. So it is no surprise that the advanced countries are exploiting the situation by offering these individuals far more handsome incentives.
Asif J. Mir writes in ‘Pakistani Think Tank’,
“We cannot achieve long-term economic growth by exporting our human resource. In the new world order, people with knowledge drive economic growth. We talk a lot of poverty alleviation in Pakistan. But who is going to alleviate the poverty-the uncreative bureaucracy that created poverty? Hypothetically, the most talented should lead the people, create wealth and eradicate poverty and corruption”.
Phillip Bonosky, contributing editor of Political Affairs, writes in his book Afghanistan-Washington’s Secret War.
“Pakistan seems to have nothing but problems. Endemic poverty which was Great Britain’s imperial gift to the colonial world-a poverty on which the sun never sets-skilled (badly needed in Pakistan itself) abroad in search for jobs. Hardly any country has suffered more from the brain drain than has Pakistan. Nearly 3,000 (annually) graduates of Pakistan’s medical colleges are jobless; most go abroad. The educated see their future not in their home country but in any country but their own”.
According to a report in the The Observer, London,
“Pakistan is facing a massive brain drain as record numbers of people desperate to leave their politically unstable, economically chaotic country swamp foreign embassies with visa applications-The biggest number of applications for British visas are from Pakistan. Doctors, lawyers and IT professional and leading the exodus, but laborers and farmhands are joining the queues of malnourished people who gather daily outside the US embassy in Islamabad”.
The greatest effect of brain drain on any country is what is seen in Pakistan today; rampant corruption, poor administrations, lack of motivation and a fast diminishing nationalism. Unless there is nationalism there can be no collective progress and poverty and crime will continue to increase under the umbrella of plethoric apathy. Whatever the solution it needs to come fast and it needs to be come now otherwise – when the educated are away, the uneducated will play – as they are playing at the moment.
Photo Credits: Flickr.com. Clicking on the photos will take you to their source pages.
All that has been written in the article is true, still not a lot problematic because of the reason that they will eventually return :)
When children grow up, when they are searched multiple times at airport, when they want to sit and talk with the people who can understand them … … ….
Haider:
Lord Byron has said, ‘He who loves not his country, can love nothing’ but you have gone a step further in calling all patriots mindless fools who expect payment for loving their country or contributing to its advancement.
The question is why do they jeopradise their successful careers and go back to one of the most ‘unsafe’ countries in the world where they can’t even get the bare minimum necesseties of life like water and electricity, and at the same time, are deprived of their basic human rights as well??
Just out of patritoism? Only a fool would do so…
I forgot to add… no need to worry about this Shariah business. I know people are worried that they won’t be able to go to cafes and start flirting or hitting on girls, or that their liquor supply will be cut off, but I’m talking about targeting the people who are so poor that they’ll be too busy schooling, then working, to worry about politics.
So maybe at one point 50 years from now we’ll have a country of powerful, educated, enlightened, Muslims who want to worry about the Shariah thing. Well so be it, then. That won’t be our worry, and if the majority of the country is behind a certain course of action, inshallah Allah will see it through.
In the meantime we should probably re-institute Zia ul-Haq’s Shariah laws on a provincial level, letting provincial assemblies vote whether to enact or not. All the militants in the NWFP would turn out for the polls next time, vote it into power, and that province could have all the Hadood Ordinances it wants, and serve as a test vehicle or guinea pig of sorts for the rest of the Islamic world for the next few decades as we slowly educate and develop the area. That, along with strictly controlling the border with Afghanistan and abandoning support for the US and NATO, will end our problems there (well aside from internal sectarian differences which will require some deeper thinking).
I think one solution is to change the way the educational system is run. The country might need to invest more into education in the short-term in order to get a return on that investment in the long-term.
Most people who are likely to leave the country can afford to do so. Yet education is possibly the single most important thing to Pakistanis, culturally, religiously, politically, however you want to view it. The average Pakistani’s dreams rise and set on education. We need to concentrate our educational system’s efforts on those Pakistanis whose dreams don’t include leaving Pakistan.
A greater amount of merit-based scholarships starting from earlier ages all the way through graduate school would ensure we’d have a professional class that would, at least for the time being, stay, work, and contribute to Pakistan. Simply because they can’t afford to leave.
I also think we need to take advantage of the madrassah system. While there are many basic madrassahs where kids go simply to learn Qur’an, I’m talking about the ones which offer actual traditional “degrees” (usually the ones based on the Dar ul Uloom Deoband model), starting from basic 4-5 year courses and all the way up to professional “takhassus” (Ph.D. equivalent) degrees.
These people, for the most part, are active, practicing Muslims who, for better or worse, will never seek to leave Pakistan. For one thing, Urdu has become one of the most important languages of Islamic study after Arabic in the world today, and for another, very few other countries allow them the freedom to live as Islamic a lifestyle as they please. Especially the women who observe the full veil or niqab, who simply have no choice of working in the US, UK, or Canada. Or in countries like Saudi-Arabia which are more Wahabi than traditional Sunni.
If the government instituted scholarship/grant programs to give graduates of these programs free rides into equivalent secular (or rather “arts and sciences”) schools. For instance, in many colleges in Pakistan, especially the government-run, there’s a substantial fee discount and lax admission standards for kids who have completed Hifz of the Qur’an. This program should be increased for those seeking to get into A/O-level programs (I’m not sure what they call that here, secondary schooling?). Those with the Alim/Alimah degrees and better should get free scholarships (provided they meet entry requirements) to undergrad/graduate programs in all fields, not just medicine or engineering, but philosophy, languages, etc. These kids are usually more committed to schooling and that Pakistani dream of education. Already there are so many women in government colleges at least who you can tell are from religious backgrounds, the more of them that are educated, the more jobs that will be created for them.
People might be afraid that the country might automatically “Islamicize” this way, with gender-segregated schools, hospitals, etc. popping up so women observing Islamic etiquettes of hijab/niqab can see only women patients for example or other things… but what’s wrong with that? More doctors are better than no doctors.
And the people from these backgrounds don’t necessarily need a good economy. Their trips through madrassahs are mostly free and many of them wind up working for free after they graduate because of how they are taught to avoid taking money for such things. It stands to reason they’d be a lot more affordable in the engineering, medical, civil service, sectors.
This would also root out and destroy all the causes of extremism, particularly those not rooted in traditional Sunni or Shi’ite schools. The government should selectively stick to Sunni and Shi’ite programs to endorse initially, and boycott all Salafi/Wahabi institutions. This would change the demographics of the nation and solve most of our current political problems. Not to mention it would finally accomplish Allama Iqbal’s vision of Pakistan as the vehicle of reconstruction of Islamic thought. We always talk about how Pakistan and Pakistanis are Allama Iqbal’s vision. Well, maybe it’s time we looked at his ENTIRE vision. The Muslim world is acutely aware of the lack of true Muslim professionals/scholars (i.e, practicing, with credentials in religion as well as worldly sciences… like the Muslims of old who made Islam the leading civilization).
This can only happen in Pakistan. Other Muslim countries are either too liberal (Turkey, Tunisia, etc. who ban Islamic activity altogether) or too conservative (Wahabi/Salafi-minded countries). We should embrace our true ‘moderate’ Islam, which is to say… straight up Sunni Islam, which is already moderate enough, even in the most strictest sense (even the ‘Deobandi’ style, despite having its reputation tarnished by the Taliban, is by doctrine much more liberal than the Wahabis of Saudi-Arabia yet that country enjoys a great relationship with the West and all the economic leaders of the world… religion is not the problem).